Avalanche transceivers are a tool we rely on in the backcountry. The UIAA plans on setting basic standards for transceivers.
The UIAA helps set safety standards for equipment like climbing ropes—the group plans to establish standards for avalanche transceivers.
Some people cringe at the thought of oversight, others exhale with relief. Considering the gear we rely on for safe mountain travel, oversight is often a good thing. Climbers, mountaineers, and alpinists are likely familiar with the UIAA stamp of approval on much of their gear. The International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation, or UIAA, helps set safety standards for equipment like climbing ropes, harnesses, and helmets. Recently, they adopted safety standards for avalanche rescue probes and shovels.
In many ways, the UIAA stamp is similar to the CE icon on our gear. CE stands for European Conformity. The CE does not set standards; the European Commission sets those. (Try to keep that straight.) However, the CE outsources testing to ensure the gear meets certain specs. Climbing gear sold in Europe must have a CE stamp.
The UIAA is a bit different, in a good way—it is composed of climbers/skiers/mountaineers and gear manufacturer representatives to develop safety and design standards specifically for the gear we use. Further, CE standards often mirror UIAA guidelines. In short, if you see something UIAA-approved, folks familiar with moving through the mountains are intimately involved with establishing the standard and ensuring the gear with the stamp meets or exceeds them.
As backcountry tourers, we rely on shovels, transceivers, probes, and, depending on your habits, avalanche airbags as our personal protective equipment (PPE). Although the shovel you use is CE-approved, the UIAA first established shovel standards in 2017, and last updated them in 2018. Probe standards, on the other hand, were set in 2021, with a compliance date for certified probes of Feb. 2022. (THR will report on these standards in the coming weeks.)
UIAA and Transceivers
Here on out, we’re focusing on transceivers: arguably an exponentially more complex PPE than your shovel and probe. (Yet these tools are not mutually exclusive; they complement one another.) Grab your transceiver, and you might note a CE logo indicating it meets European design standards. The transceiver in my hands, a Barryvox S, has no such symbol. I can, however, rest assured. As manufacturers do for their respective transceivers, I can find an EU Declaration of Conformity on the Barryvox site.
For now, however, there are no UIAA standards for transceivers. In the coming years, that is likely to change.
Let’s start with this table from the German Alpine Club (DAV). Published in 2022, it attempts to specify strengths and weaknesses regarding some of the available avalanche transceivers. (Editor’s note: this is 2022 data and does not include software or hardware updates since the publication date or recalls in North America or Europe.) Rather than hone in on any single attribute, the information, at first glance, speaks to the diversity of transceivers in the marketplace—there’s little physical or performance uniformity.
Avalanche Transceiver Test 2022 from the German Alpine Club. Read the full DAV Avalanche Transceiver Test here. Another solid read on the topic comes from Ian Nicholson.
The DAV didn’t just publish this nifty visual. They published a more comprehensive report regarding each transceiver’s functionality, strengths, and weaknesses. The document is an excellent starting point to learn more about the product. Yet, it also leaves some gaps. Primarily, we’d like to see a more thorough discussion of each unit’s response to specific levels (both in intensity and proximity) of electromagnetic noise.
What the DAV information makes clear is we have choices. And this transceiver diversity is an issue for Marc Beverly, an IFMGA mountain guide, previous UIAA Executive Board member, and current Safety Commission corresponding member.
“Ultimately, somebody who’s got any level of avalanche education and has done an avalanche course, they’ve had their hands on a transceiver—they should be able to pick up one anywhere in the world and do the overall drill, regardless of what language you speak. We should all have the same hand signals; everything should be standardized to a certain base level,” said Beverly, who helps lead the UIAA’s avalanche transceiver initiative.
Beverly sees a time when the procedures for a transceiver check or a victim search are the same no matter where you learn or take a formal course, be it Driggs, Val di Fiemme, or Revelstoke. For now, some best practices regarding rescues are not universally accepted. Further, Beverly says transceivers pose some unneeded complexity that could complicate processes like a basic beacon check and victim search.
Transceiver Design
A sample size of 1 proves the point. On a typical tour with my friends, we’ve got a Barryvox S, Pieps Pro BT, BCA Tracker 4, and an Ortovox Diract Voice in use. Turning the units off and on are vastly different. All four transceivers have unique sequences to initiate a group check. There’s a different mechanical switch sequence to place in transmit or search mode and to ensure the respective mode is securely locked in position. It gets more complex. Depending on the transceiver, how to flag located transceivers/victims during a multi-person burial varies between transceiver models, as does each unit’s response to active and passive electromagnetic noise. This is to say nothing about each model’s ergonomics and ease of use and mastery for a range of users.
Beverly recognizes that transceiver manufacturers desire a certain branding identity and operational functions. However, diversity, in the case of a vital safety tool like an avalanche transceiver, could limit efficacy in some more complicated scenarios.
“From a practitioner’s point of view, if I’m a guide and in the field doing a rescue course, I want each student to perform a group check–that can be complex, with the variety of beacons out there,” said Beverly. “We recognize that you can’t just do that; it wastes time and energy and adds some confusion, especially for new students or if a transceiver needs to be substituted and someone isn’t familiar with the functions, which are specific by manufacturer. And so it’s not just a group check. Further, there are several different places along the way to eventually standardize performance controls to decrease variability when somebody searching experiences false positives or false negatives. What we want is a more consistent pattern among all transceivers.”
The UIAA sees its role as interfacing with practitioners (not just professionals), manufacturers, and transceiver design experts to develop a group consensus for developing transceiver standards and basic design parameters (like on/off, search/transmit, flagging, and determining battery life) as well as standardizing readings for range and how each respective beacon responds to EMI (electromagnetic interference).
The UIAA’s transceiver working group, says Beverly, aspires to allow a user to “go to the store, buy a transceiver with a UIAA safety label, meaning you know that it meets certain standards and criteria, just like your carabiner, just like your rope, and your helmet. And as transceivers progress and move forward in the next couple of years, we want them to be usable in a standardized way—EMI is part of that.”
If you are new to the concept of EMI and are looking for an intermediate level discussion on the topic, this presentation by BCA’s Bruce Edgerly on transceivers and EMI is excellent.
The complexities of EMI and how it affects transceiver function will likely remain a manageable issue. (Still, keep active and passive EMI sources at appropriate distances from your transceiver when in either send or receive mode.) Depending on the make of the transceiver in use during a search, EMI may cause false triggers, range loss, and noise drag. These issues take time and experience—which means plenty of practice—to recognize and mitigate in the field.
“We’re still in the process of gaining a research repository of everything that we can get on EMI, anybody who’s ever written a paper or anybody who’s done research in the field, and having a third party independent reviewer stratify that data, so that we can look at performing some better scientific research on the topic through a systematic review of the literature. There’s not a lot of high quality research at this time, so we hope that changes this year,” added Beverly.
No timetable was given for a definitive set of UIAA avalanche transceiver standards.
When can I use my phone as a beacon? Our phones have exceptional capability that’s beyond the realm of what’s possible with beacons. Seems logical that there’s a future where our phones have a native capability that can be repurposed for avy search or an app is built specifically for it. Any ideas from those more hardwear focused if this is a realistic premise?
Good question Travis. I’m sure all of us who purchased an iPhone 1.0 thought these devices might double as a transceiver someday. I’ll leave the conversation regarding EMI and circuitry to those better qualified. My concern would be the power supply/batteries and corresponding longevity on a phone. I’ve had bad luck historically with phone batteries. (Although I know many folks carry a small external battery to recharge a phone in the field.)
I am not sure if that would be desirable. Most of us have our phones out quite a bit, for navigation and photos. This means that there is a (relatively) large risk of having lost or damaged your phone, in case of an emergency.
Agreed Slim—add all of what you noted to my concerns. Some interesting conversations out there regarding alternate technologies. Maybe I’d like a smaller, lower profile transceiver, but I want it to do one job (search/locate a victim and send a signal) and do that job well with a minimal amount of fuss and confusion.
I get it, but I think there’s a quantum leap waiting for us in terms of capability. Imagine if you could open the app and see the precise location of everyone in your group regardless of the situation-a la AirTags. Then in an emergency you open the app and ski to the person closest who is buried. You tie this back to the smart watch they are wearing and you don’t have to worry about the use case of taking your camera out as a map/camera. Further, you could potentially see the blood oxygen levels and heart rate of the individual. Allowing you to focus on individuals that weren’t killed (morbid I know) by trauma. Now, I would love it if Mammut, Ortovox, Pieps, et al would build these capabilities into their own devices, but the market isn’t big enough to sustain it. In terms of hardware, we’re going to see the next level of innovation come from outside the ski community. The development costs and scale needed to bring costs down are too great for our niche to sustain the innovation from a hardware perspective, software on the other hand is another story. Look for disruption in this space. My only fear is that UIAA standards will prohibit this from becoming viable, as it will structure the standards around the existing form factor and stifle innovation. Doesn’t have to be this way, but it could if the standards aren’t written with innovation in mind. I’d hate for us to lock ourselves into outdated tech when lives could be saved.
Lots of great points and excellent real-world scenarios to consider here. It will be interesting to note how these standards, once released, skew either towards the innovation or existing form factor norms.
Note, I’m not suggesting air tags would work. I don’t believe it would in a burial situation, frequency is too low. Just drawing an analogy to the search UI of Air Tags. Better thing would be, can a smartphone detect a beacon. Then using your beacon for search is the backup.
I’m not an electronics expert but my guess why they aren’t combo’ed with a phone is due to the antenna’s and expectation of performance around them. Phones have way more computing power, larger screens and super tiny antennas compared to beacons but work at different frequencies and have different working conditions. It seems that in order to hit that ~60m distance or ~0.1m fine search under snow, there is just a certain size antenna that works based on what is available currently with materials, design and tuning. They also need to fit 3 of whatever antenna’s they design along x,y,z. Look at the pieps micro (I think that’s the smallest fully functional beacon) it has a tiny form factor but only has a 40m range.
Using bluetooth is an interesting idea but airtags only have a realistic 10m of range they are just transmitting to whatever is nearby and then getting the signal processed at an apple server somewhere. Bluetooth can have higher ranges than that, but the larger the distance the less data that can be processed. Maybe beacon signal processing takes enough data that bluetooth isn’t attractive?
I could totally see someone making a paired beacon + phone combo that is smaller overall, a la garmin in reach mini + phone. Where the “beacon” is just the antenna’s and electronics to send data to your phone and your phone is the processor and user interface. Could maybe have it clipped directly to your phone or it stays in your pocket and you just pull out the phone for search.
Also, another thought. When can my beacon be a drone that can scan the area of a football field in seconds and I can ski to the first marked spot and be digging asap. In my opinion the hardwear and software are ready for this, there’s simply not enough market demand to make the cost of spinning up the supply chain and manufacturing for our niche sport. One day this is where things will be, most likely for SAR first and then it will trickle down to the consumer. I imagine it will have a commercial use first, and then be co-opted for our sport. Hopefully the UIAA standards also promote innovation and don’t lock us into the tech we have today.